When Julie wakes up on Saturday, something weird happens. One day, she thinks, I’m not going to wake up. The world will go on and I won’t be here.
Her body does something peculiar in response to this thought. It seems to shrink from the inside, and with a little fizz and a little pop in her stomach, Julie immediately wants to cry. She feels like a little girl again.
She can’t even sit up; she just lies there in bed feeling disorientated. All her life, Julie’s seen death as failure: failure to be careful; failure to eat the right things; failure to notice that fishbone or that strange man following you or the car coming too fast down the road you’re about to cross. It’s always been as though life was an equation you could solve, or a multiple-choice test that, if you got all the answers right, would go on forever.
Is life a test? That’s what Julie was taught at school. She remembers her RE teacher, a little lady with white hair, explaining how God tests people – how bad things might happen to you but they’re just a test and if you pass you can go to Heaven. Somewhere during her childhood, Julie stopped believing in Heaven and God, but she still retained the idea that life was somehow a test that would just carry on until you failed. On some level Julie thought that if you just kept making the right decisions, you could live forever. This wasn’t conscious thought. But in any case, it’s a thought she suddenly doesn’t have any more. She could do with something comforting in her unconscious but it’s too late. She’s just realised that there’s no such thing as immortality.
Julie thought she had death under control but she doesn’t. She thought that, if she drove slowly, avoided motorways, didn’t eat food with bones, never went down dark alleyways and never took risks, she could live forever. But now she understands: she’s going to die whatever she does. She’s an organism, like a worm or an aphid, and organisms die. One day she’s not going to be able to control her existence because she literally will not exist any more.
When Julie was about twelve her mother’s friend Rosa was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Julie picked up that much from overhearing her mother on the phone to various friends from the poly but she never worked out what disease Rosa actually had. A few weeks later Rosa left her husband. Then she moved in with Julie’s family.
Helen and Rosa decided between them that the disease could be cured with herbs used by tribal cultures, and meditation and cannabis. Keeping Rosa alive became a twenty-four-hour occupation and it seemed like every time Julie went into the kitchen her mother was blending yet another high-potency drink. Either that or Rosa was lying on the table smoking a joint while Julie’s mother stood there giggling and trying to remember how to balance Rosa’s chakras. The one thing Julie could never understand was the way they seemed to be having so much fun all the time. Weren’t you supposed to be sad when someone was dying?
In the end Julie’s dad got pissed off with having Rosa around and said that although he felt sorry for her his house wasn’t a hospice or a tribal meditation centre. He took Julie to stay with his parents for a few days, and when they got back Rosa was gone. Julie never found out what happened to her, or if all the herbs and potions worked.
Now she thinks about it she realises she’d always assumed that they had worked. The whole process had seemed so scientific at the time (although obviously, now Julie looks at it with grown-up eyes, it wasn’t). But mainly it seemed that you couldn’t try that hard at something and fail. It wouldn’t be fair. Julie’s RE teacher taught her that God rewards hard work. Even though Julie stopped believing in God ages ago she still felt that hard work should be rewarded – not by a made-up man in a beard, but at least by the results. You couldn’t work hard and have no results, could you? That’s science: fuel in, energy out. Energy doesn’t just disappear; it creates change. So if you wanted to live, and you wanted it enough, you could make it happen. People who died clearly just didn’t want to live that much. As a child, Julie wasn’t scared of cancer or MS or AIDS, because she knew that if you tried hard enough, you could make yourself better.
That’s why Julie’s devoted her life to avoiding accidents. Car accidents, plane crashes, choking on a fishbone, getting stuck in a tall building that catches fire, accidental poisoning, food allergies, Toxic Shock Syndrome. The theory: you take away risk and end up with a non-risk activity. That’s maths. But now Julie realises that life isn’t a non-risk activity or even a low-risk activity. Life ends in death no matter what you do. It’s high risk.
She manages to sit up. She looks at all the mess in her room and imagines it all being boxed up and thrown away. Her books and clothes would probably be sent to Oxfam and the rest would just get thrown out and end up in some landfill somewhere. Julie imagines all her pieces of paper becoming pulp and her pencils decomposing. Then she sees all the plastic things in her room. They’re not biodegradable. And then she realises that her plastic ruler, her biros and her calculator will actually exist for longer than she will. They’re not biodegradable. She is. When she’s dead and forgotten her ruler and pens and her calculator will still exist. They’re artificial. They never lived; they can’t die. When Julie dies the rest of the world will carry on and she’ll never get to see it. And her calculator will still be there at the bottom of some pit somewhere but no one will ever use it again. It won’t work any more and the metal parts will have rusted away but the place on the plastic where she carved her name with a compass will never disappear. This is the saddest thought she’s ever had.
Julie imagines telling Luke about her revelation, and she sees him laughing.
‘You thought about death?’ he’s saying. ‘Hey, what a surprise.’
But this isn’t the way Julie normally thinks about death. She goes straight over.
Luke comforts Julie while she cries.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he says, stroking her hair.
‘I don’t want to die,’ she says.
‘You won’t die until you’re very old. I promise.’
‘But I’ll be old before I know it and . . .’
‘Old people don’t mind dying,’ says Luke. ‘They’re prepared for it.’
‘What, the ones on TV, you mean?’
Luke’s face falls. He moves away from Julie. ‘I . . .’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ Julie says. ‘Luke, I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s not my fault I’ve only got the TV. I do try to understand life.’
‘I know.’
‘I want to go out and discover all this myself.’
‘I know.’
‘I hate the way everything I know is filtered through that fucking glass screen.’ He points at his TV. ‘Or that one.’ He points at his computer. ‘Fucking, goddamn screens. I hate it, Julie.’
Now Julie comforts Luke. He doesn’t cry, though. He seems to be trying to find the right words to say something.
‘At least we’re not like David,’ he says, in the end. ‘Poor David.’ And then Luke does start to cry. ‘Poor David,’ he keeps saying. He doesn’t even know David but that doesn’t seem to matter.
‘We’re going to get you out of here,’ says Julie softly. ‘We’ll find a way.’